Yesterday we were talking about Seth Godin’s announcement that he was abandoning his publisher and was going to be self-publishing everything from here on in, presumably electronically. The story was reported in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Author to Bypass Publisher for Fans”—Page B7), by their publishing reporter, the very perceptive Jeffrey Trachtenberg, who reported the surprising fact that Linchpin had sold only about 50,ooo copies retail (perhaps as many as 100,000 copies total, including direct and by-author sales, which in Godin’s case, is considerable—but overall, still a surprisingly low number). I discussed how I should have been prepared to take up arms against Seth and defend the publisher and the traditional book publisher, given that yesterday I received word that my own book, Religion in America, was going to be published and bound books would be available ahead of schedule (I still think somebody ought to pinch me—I must be dreaming), and I speculated (none too wildly) that this may have something to do with the coming showdown on September 28th, when the fate of Barnes & Noble (and, in my view, the entire future of publishing, books and reading in America) will be determined. (And since everyone likes a good closed-cage no-holds-barred wrestling match with two yelling over-the-top showmen, here’s that New York Magazine article again about the face-off between Len Riggio and Ron Burkle, in case you missed it.) I was stymied in my defense of the book by this surprising turn of events because it prevented me from entering some small (I was going to say minor, but no corrections can be viewed as minor, can they) corrections from an Eastern religious group, and I was going to lose sleep over this (literally—this is no joke, buster). But I pointed out that there were other aspects of yesterdays events that entered the picture. Here they are:

ITEM: I was also informed yesterday that an e-book of Religion in America was also going to be produced soon (meaning, within two or three months, instead of the usual never) after the publication of the print edition. Now, in the past, publishers have been so lax in producing electronic editions of the books I’ve produced, that I’ve accumulated the electronic rights of nearly everything I’ve ever created. We routinely had our contracts read that the publisher had one year following first print publication to exploit the electronic rights, and failure to do so—a foregone conclusion—meant that those rights reverted to me. But here was a publisher who was making a point of telling me that they were issuing the electronic edition of the book right away. What is pertinent here is my reaction to this news. I was elated. I am almost embarrassed to say that I was elated. Now it would be possible to accommodate those corrections—in fact, to enter all corrections as they are received. But there was much more:

When you do a large reference book like this, you become painfully aware of the limitations of the space of the page. Every inch becomes valuable and every column inch has to give a good accounting of itself. I’ve always told people that the most valuable experience I’ve ever had preparing me for my career as a reference editor was watching and helping my mother pack for the times we went away to a hotel for the Sukkoth holiday or for any vacation. She crammed so much into those suitcases that you could feel them straining as they were just sitting there on the floor. They were like ticking bombs, ready to burst open at any moment and cover everyone and everything in the room (or the lobby we were walking through) with all our underwear, winter coats (even in the middle of summer—because you never know how cold it gets in the mountains), and just about every other article of clothing and household goods we owned. The hackers who drove us to those hotels in the Catskills or Lakewood looked forward to picking us up with dread, knowing that the Rabinowitzes’ luggage was going to be the heaviest and most tightly packed luggage on their run—so tightly packed, that if they didn’t put our’s on the bottom of the pile on top of the station wagon, they risked the possibility that a suitcase would burst open while we were on the New York State Thruway and we (my mother, my father, the hacker, and me) would be out combing the countryside for Itzik’s long undies and little Hershele’s collection of sweater vests (a possibility that became horribly real one drizzly Sukkoth eve in 1958!).

Take a look at all the reference books that we’ve produced at The Reference Works over the years and you’ll notice that, good, bad or indifferent, you certainly got a hunk of reference for your book-buying dollar. The books had a lot of text and a generous helping of illustration, and not a great deal of white space—and even the images were not sprawling, indulgent affairs; they were to the point, compact. The books had to be attractively designed in order to be Book-of-the-Month Club Main selections (six times!), but they were filled with stuff to read, and stuff worth reading.

All right. But now we tackled the largest subject yet—Religion in America—and tried to pack it into a suitcase that was less than a thousand pages. It wasn’t easy. Many times during the process I thought, it would be nice if we had the possibility of adding the feature of a video or an audio, or additional linkages that would take readers to websites that would instruct and show religious ceremonies and historical footage, perhaps sacred sites around the world or at least in the United States. The images available alone would fill a book ten times the size. In a sense, for me the book became a kind of catalog and guide to what was available on the internet and elsewhere about each religious denomination. There are 14 essays in Part Two of the book—we could have put in 140 or more covering issues of interest and concern in the religious scene today. No reason we can’t in an electronic version—along with reader comments and video readings of addresses and lectures.

It was while editing this book that the full capabilities of the electronic medium became apparent to me—but it was also during this period that it became clear that the print edition was a critical element in the process. The print edition, burdened with all the so-called traditional values and methods of editing and publishing, was tight and fluid, easy to read and clear—hallmarks of good writing and good reference publishing. The discipline of editing is what allows the electronic to flourish in a way that serves the reader instead of inundating him and making the page a hodge-podge of what passes for information so often on the information highway. So while I have a new appreciation of the possibilities of electronic publishing, I also have a newfound appreciation of the importance of traditional bookmaking and its place in this new environment.

So I’m ready for you now, Mr. Godin. In tomorrow’s conclusion to this post, Part 3 of “Will Linchpin be the last book ANYBODY publishes in the traditional way?”—I’ll tell you why I think you’re making a big mistake—and why you’ll find yourself coming back to Portfolio (or perhaps another imprint) and the warm, supportive editorial shelter of a book editor office, a publisher’s house, and bookmaker’s home.

Seth Godin’s blog post yesterday was about how Linchpin, his wonderful book about how every person can become indispensable to a company or to a start-up, by using his or her unique talents, is going to be the last book he is going to publish in the old, traditional way. It’s an eloquent argument for doing away with the traditional way of producing books and for his personal abandonment of the the publisher as a means of communicating with his audience. It’s worth reading because it’s as good a presentation of exactly what I am fighting against and defending as one is likely to see.

This should have been a day when I was certain that Seth Godin was wrong—when I saw a glimmer of light for books and I would feel an elation about the future of books. A good day for Book Templars–let me tell you why. I received the unexpected news that a book I had edited and on which I had work for a long, long time was going to actually exist as bound books on September 21 (September 21 of this year), which happens to be my birthday. The fact is, I had given up hope of ever seeing this book in print. It was a 992-page work on the full range of Religion in America (that’s its title) and I had actually handed it in for publication, completely ready for printing (my God!) two yeas ago. But now I’d been told that the publication date has been moved up—leaving me to wonder if this has something to do with the bizarre melodrama that’s very publicly playing out in the Boardroom of the publisher’s parent company—and book will be extant a week before the “big showdown” oat that company’s stockholders meeting.

All right—let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. Let’s take it and be overjoyed. A great day for books, and great day for me and books, right? So please explain the following several items, some related to this book, and some related to some of the other publishing projects I’m involved in:

ITEM: When I got the news regarding Religion in America, I was in the process of calling the publisher to arrange for material to be sent to the production department that consisted of some corrections that came in from one of the religious organizations covered in the book. The religion covered had been reviewed already when we first handed in the book and it had been well reviewed. These corrections were either new information that reflected the last two years of developments, or errors that had cropped up in the production process itself. (Copy editors know that the very process of correcting proof creates the likelihood of new errors being introduced into the text, and that the best you can do is cut down the errors to a minimum. Like a precious gem, some flaws always remain, and anyone who believes a book is ever published without any errors is a damn fool.)

But this religious group had been very conscientious and I had agreed to try (with no guarantees) to accommodate them and enter their corrections, late as the process was. Since the book was originally not scheduled to be out until 2011, which meant it would not be going to press until October at the earliest (and since the corrections meant changes in only two or three pages, and no re-pagination—and since I would do the corrections myself and submit them on the publisher’s FTP site ready to go), I thought there’d be no problem. But I was wrong. The publishing of the book was hurried and the books were, in fact, already being bound. And now I would have to explain all this to the representatives of the religious group, who would be understanding, I know (they’ve always been so), but disappointed, as will I, for even the slightest error knowingly being contained in the book. (It’s one thing when you know there’s an error somewhere in the book; it’s another when you know exactly where and what it is.)

Now you know that this is going to bother me no end, and that every time I show anyone the book, I’ll (needlessly) point out the really good things about it—that it contains an essay by Pope Benedict XVI and by Greg Easterbrook from Wired magazine; that it contains some 400 illustrations; that it was thoroughly reviewed by every denomination as thoroughly as humanly possible—but I’ll also point out the few errors with this particular religion and tell people that “we just didn’t have time to enter the corrections because the printing was rushed because of the corporate problems that everybody heard about in the newspapers…what? You didn’t hear about it? Well, let me tell you…”